Death Wish still reaping benefits from Super Bowl ad

Death Wish Coffee Company founder Mike Brown, left, and Customer Service Manager Kane Grogan, left, have plenty to smile about as sales keep growing, spurred in part by a free ad that appeared during the Super Bowl last February.
photos by Paul Post - ppost@digitalfirstmedia.com

ROUND LAKE >> Comic books and NASCAR races aren’t the typical way to market a leading coffee brand.

But there’s nothing ordinary about Death Wish Coffee or its customers, whose numbers have grown exponentially since the company won a free television ad, shown during Super Bowl 50 last February.

To keep up with demand, the firm is moving into a new 16,000-square-foot space, almost three times the size of its current base, at Tech Valley Flex Park in Round Lake.

“We had $6 million in sales last year,” said Michael Brown, Death Wish founder and owner. “Now it’s in the tens of millions. However, we’re being careful not to take on too much.”

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Requests for an expanding line of products and promotional appearances keep pouring in, though. Next week, Brown is traveling to San Jose, Ca. for a business conference whose featured speakers include NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal, Olympic gold-medalist swimmer Michael Phelps and actress Eva Longoria.

The event is being put on by Intuit Quickbooks, the same firm that sponsored the Small Business Big Game Contest that Death Wish won against 15,000 other companies for the free Super Bowl ad.

“We were doubling in size each year already,” said Brown, who launched Death Wish in 2013. “With a good fourth quarter, revenue could quadruple this year.”

The firm’s payroll has also grown from 10 to 16 employees with several more expected in the coming weeks for shipping and receiving, production and customer service positions.

It’s the same kind of jolt consumers expect from a cup of Death Wish, which bills itself as the “World’s Strongest Coffee,” with twice the caffeine found in most brands.

“It’s definitely for people who need a kick in the butt in the morning,” Brown said, smiling.

“We’re popular with anybody who’s on edge and drinks coffee throughout the day, people like filmmakers, doctors, lawyers and engineers,” said Kane Grogan, customer service manager. “We aren’t competing with other coffee companies. Our main competitors are energy drinks like Red Bull and Monster.”

Recently, Death Wish’s skull-and-crossbones logo was on the hood of driver Ty Dillon’s car in a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race in Dover, Delaware. Brown and Grogan got to watch it from the track-side pits.

“It was neat seeing our name up there against some of the biggest brands in the world like Target, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s,” Brown said.

Also, Death Wish was highly visible at the Oct. 6-9 New York Comic Con, the biggest pop culture event in North America that attracted nearly 200,000 people to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan.

Each new event brings more connections and opportunities.

However, Brown learned a difficult lesson the hard way about trying to grow too big, too fast.

He founded Death Wish, with online sales only, as a side business to Saratoga Coffee Traders, a retail coffee shop that he still owns in Saratoga Springs.

Unexpectedly, ABC’s Good Morning America heard about Death Wish, a unique venture, and decided it would make a good story. But the company wasn’t prepared for such publicity.

“We went from 30 to 3,000 orders per week,” Grogan said. “We couldn’t handle it. We got kicked off Amazon and eBay.”

“We did a lot of asking for forgiveness to get back on,” Brown said.

Last year’s announcement that Death Wish had won the Super Bowl ad brought another huge crush of publicity from almost every media outlet in the country including Forbes and CNN Money.

“The difference is that we were set up for the growth that’s followed,” Brown said.

At present, online sales including Walmart.com still account for roughly 90 percent of the company’s revenue stream. However, Death Wish Coffee is also found in Market 32 (Price Chopper) stores and will soon be in 62 Hannaford supermarkets as well. Safeway and Target stores are a possibility, too.

So a year from now, direct retail might account for 30 percent of overall sales.

Death Wish Coffee’s 30-second Super Bowl ad, which reached 112 million viewers worldwide, was worth $5 million. However, its impact has been virtually priceless because the Death Wish brand and products have sold themselves with very little need for advertising.

The firm recently introduced a coffee vodka, with the Death Wish label, made by Albany Distilling Company, and a line of beers such as Nightmare IPA made by Olde Saratoga Brewing Company.

“It’s mostly word-of-mouth,” Grogan said. “We’re the number one coffee company for social media. We produce a lot of content people can share online like blogs and videos. Sales goals that were five and 10 years out, we’re hitting now.”